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John Jota Leanos

Affiliated Faculty

John Jota Leaños is a media artist and social-art practitioner focusing on critical convergences of history, memory, social space, and decolonization. Leaños’ animation, installation, public art, and performance fuse traditional art practices and aesthetics with new technologies and contemporary interpretations. Currently an Assistant Professor of Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Department of Film and Digital Media, Leaños is a Creative Capital Foundation Grantee (2002) who has received the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2011 United States Artist Fellowship Award, San Francisco Art Commission Individual Artist Grant (2011), Irvine Foundations Creative Connections Grant (2009–2010), the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) Artist Award (2009), The MAP Fund Award(2009), the Creative Work Fund Award (2007, 2000), Center for Arts and Society Fellowship, and an artist's residency at the Center for Arts and Society at Carnegie Mellon (2002–2003).

Trained as a photographer, Leaños also works in art installation. His installation Remembering Castration: Bloody Metaphors in Aztlán debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2002 Biennial. Other conceptual, sculptural, and video installations have been shown at venues such as Arte Interactiva Biennial, Merdida, Mexico (2009, 2007), the Oakland Museum (2007, 2006), Art in General, NYC (2003), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001), and Museo del Barrio in New York (1999), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (1998). His 1968 Chevy Impala lowrider media installation, El Muertorider, will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2012. Leaños also produced radio-installation works at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2008) and the Oakland Museum (2007). He also streamed radio programming created by artists and Oakland youth for the Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) installation at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

In response to the climate of political and ideological censorship during the height of the “War on Terror,” Leaños began working in musical and documentary animation as a tactic to diffuse political intolerance. In his first animation, Los ABCs ¡Qué Vivan los Muertos! (2005), a Mariachi chorus documents twenty-six injustices of war in a Days of the Dead, Gorey-esque fashion. His four animations have been shown internationally at festivals and museums including the Sundance Film Festival (2010, 2006), Cannes Film Festival, France (2007), Morelia International Film Festival, México (2008), WILDsound Film Festival, Toronto (2008), BAM/PFA (2011), Artivist Film Festival (2006), the KOS Convention (2007), the de Young Museum, San Francisco (2010), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2008, 2006) and dozens of others.

From 2000 to 2004, Leaños was a third of artist collective Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Críitca, critically engaging high technology from Latino perspectives. Los Cybrids performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2002), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001), the Galería de la Raza (2002), and in the streets. Their performance “El World Brain Disorder:surveillance.control.pendejismo” toured galleries and universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Brown, and the University of San Francisco.

Of Mexican-Italian-American descent, Leaños received his M.F.A. in Photography from San Francisco State University in 2000. He has taught as an artist-in-residence at Carnegie Mellon University in the Art Department (2003) and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Center for Chicano Studies (2005–2006). Leaños was an Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at Arizona State University 2003-07 and an Assistant Professor of Social Practices and Community Arts at the California College of the Arts 2007-09.

"Dead Conversations on Art and Politics" in Filming Difference: Actors, Directors, Producers and Writers on Gender, Race and Sexuality in Film. Edited by Daniel Bernardi. University of Texas, 2009.

"Art Education in the Age of NeoConvervatism" in Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: The Effects of School Reform in a Neoliberal/NeoConservative Age. Co-written with Anthony J. Villareal. Editor David Gabbard. Lawrence Eribaum, 2007.

Teaching Interests:

Documentary Animation History and Production
Social Documentary Practice
New Media & Social Practice
Latina/o Popular Culture